My review of Season Three

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Reacher’s last chance (Part 2) >>

Hello again and happy Thursday all. This week (and next, TBC) I’m reviewing Season Three of Reacher, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Lee Child’s famous badass. I hesitated to watch this season on account of how bad the last one was.

My review of Season 2 is here, but if you’re in a hurry, here’s the Sparknotes version:

• The gritty realism of the book veered into fantasy
• The explosions were awful (of course I get hung up on this)
• Reacher’s Terminator-esque physical feats defy the laws of physics
• Unlike the Reacher of the books, Alan Richson’s character in Season 2 is a psychopath and a thug

I explored some of the potential reasons why Season 2 was so bad, including the Hollywood writers’ strike of May-Sep 2023 (although the timings don’t quite work out), and the source material (Bad Luck and Trouble) not being the easiest to adapt.

At the end of my last review I said:

I’ll give Reacher a second chance. I won’t give it a third. Jack wouldn’t.

Well, I did and here’s my verdict. Be warned: there will obviously be many spoilers for the show and the book in this article. And if you don’t mind a spoiler for this review: it’s bad. It’s so bad that I’m going to have to split my critiques over two posts. In today’s piece I’ll cover the climactic fight of the season, which is, of course, Reacher and Paulie’s showdown. I’ll talk about one big and several small reasons why it disappointed me so much.

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Reacher kills Paulie using Bugs Bunny logic

The climactic scene of the last episode sees Reacher take on the big baddie¹ in a fight scene that drags on lasts for over five minutes and ends like this:

Ah, sorry, I mixed up my GIFs—they are very similar. Here’s the actual one from Reacher:

Here’s the video clip (the full fight starts here and continues here). For a fun activity, try to see where, in between getting clobbered with a 10 kg steel box to the face, Reacher does this switcheroo trick with the bullet:

I’m happy to suspend my disbelief for a movie or TV show when it drives the plot or simply makes for better viewing. Up to a point, of course. That point might come sooner than with most people, but it’s still there. I’m not a complete pedant and killjoy. I’ll refer back to my tried-and-tested see-saw of fantasy vs. realism:

Let’s break down what exactly is wrong with this scene (aside from it being straight out of the Looney Tunes playbook).

A blocked barrel would be catastrophic to both fighters…

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Reacher’s “smart” plan to kill Paulie worked. Despite the lack of visual evidence (this weapon is definitely not Chekov’s Gun²), let’s suppose Reacher managed to extract a round³ from the belt and jam it down the barrel of the gun. What happens then?

Let’s draw a rough diagram of the situation before Paulie pulls the trigger:

With this as our starting point, what happens when Paulie attempts to fire the weapon? Firing any gun results in:

• A lot of gas being generated which, in turn, causes
• The bullet to accelerate down the barrel

These two elements, the gas and the bullet, need to go somewhere. Let’s look at the situation again, post-firing, to get a picture of the problem:

The pressure generated needs to go somewhere. As you can see from the diagram above, the most likely place for it to go is out the front (the muzzle) of the barrel, where there’s the least amount of material blocking its path. Along, of course, with the thing causing the obstruction in the first place. And maybe bits of the now-split open barrel.

The pressure won’t go to the sides because the barrel walls are thick, especially towards the breech (back) end. And it won’t go out the breech because any firearm bigger than a pistol or small submachine gun has a breech which locks in place until the bullet has left the barrel and the gas pressure has reduced to a safe level.

None of this is to imply that a barrel obstruction is no big deal for the firer: on the contrary, it can be awful, with the resulting blowback having injury potential. But this isn’t remotely as bad as being in front of the blocked barrel. Here’s a heat-map of the worst places to be when it comes to a barrel obstruction:

By blocking the barrel, Reacher has turned a bad option (get shot by Paulie, die, maybe have an open casket) into a worse option (get shot by Paulie, die, have a closed casket). The only consolation with this option is that maybe Paulie gets some propellant burns or fragmentation to this face. Given what they’ve both just been through, however, that’s probably the least of his worries.

Just for completeness, I’ll put up the Mythbusters clip where they test this cartoon logic (and obviously find it wanting):

…but it doesn’t matter, because you can’t block the barrel

This is all academic, because there’s no way Reacher would have been able to pull off his little sleight of hand. In fact, he literally would have been unable to pull off the round from the belt. Heavy machine gun (HMG) rounds come pre-belted from the factory⁴, but you can manually break the belts to remove loose rounds (as Reacher supposedly does) or to make longer belts. You could probably do it by hand, and Reacher definitely could, but it’s a fiddly process. Here’s how it looks like, done fast, with a screwdriver to assist:

The above is NATO 12.7 x 99 mm, which is not the same cartridge as the Warsaw Pact NATO 12.7 x 108 mm round used in the NSV machine gun. The rounds above come in disintegrating links: if anything, they would be easier to take apart than the Russian ammunition.

And just in case you’re thinking Reacher leaves the round on the belt and just pulls the bullet off the round, that doesn’t work either, for two reasons:

• Pulling the bullet out of a cartridge case would be even harder than pulling a round off a belt: it’s not designed to be removed by hand. It’s less a question of strength and more a question of friction and purchase, and there’s no way he could do this with his bloody, sweaty hands.
• Pushing a loose round into the end of the barrel would also be nigh-on impossible. A bullet is very slightly wider than the space in the barrel (this is so that the rifling, or twists in the barrel, can impart spin on the bullet), so it will not go in without significant pressure behind it.

Don’t just take my word for it, however. You can actually see Paulie’s eyes rolling as Reacher “well-actually”⁵s him:

The entire fight scene is a cartoon pastiche of the book version

The Bugs Bunny trick which Reacher plays on Elmer Fudd Paulie is a reflection of the cartoon nature of the whole fight scene. In the book, this is a furious and fast-paced fight to the death between two humans (albeit very large ones). In the show, it’s a laborious video game boss fight between two characters with full bars of HP. Each punch takes a sliver of health points, each kick or throw maybe a little more. Get enough points off the other guy and you get to use a combo. Paulie’s combo is the chain noose. Reacher’s is the carrot in the shotgun trick.

In the show, Reacher takes at least eleven blows to the face from Paulie, not to mention being thrown a few times, having several tonnes of fertiliser fall on top of him, and being hanged with a chain. Remember, Paulie is supposed to be a monster. He weighs four hundred pounds. A punch from Paulie is not something you bounce back from. In the book, this is much clearer, and it makes for real stakes. Paulie gets one direct punch to Reacher’s face (and one to his chest, and one to his side), and that’s Reacher almost done for:

I looked for the guns. They were still behind him. I couldn’t get to them. I had hit him six times and he was laughing at me. He had hit me three times and I was a mess. I was badly shaken up. I was going to die. I knew it with sudden clarity.

In the book, Reacher uses a gun on Paulie as soon as he’s able to. At every stage of the fight, he’s looking to get at the guns, but the monster is in the way. In the show, he refrains from guns because he doesn’t want to alert the folks in the house… but then he blazes away on the heavy machine gun as soon as he gets a chance. Book Reacher is not an idiot. He knows what he’s up against, and he knows how to seize the moment when Paulie makes a mistake:

The first rule of street fighting is when you get your guy on the ground you finish him, no hesitation, no pause, no inhibition, no gentlemanly conduct. You finish him. Paulie had ignored that rule. I didn’t.

Film Reacher is an idiot, despite him telling us he’s smart. When he takes Paulie by surprise by kicking him in the groin, he punches him once and then stands back to watch, instead of taking advantage of Paulie’s temporary pain and weakness to gouge out his eyes, shatter his knees, or some other Reacher-y dirty trick.

TV Reacher has to tell us he’s smart. Book Reacher is actually smart, because he realises that he cannot out fight someone who’s bigger, stronger, tougher, and just as fast as he is. The only reason he prevails is because Paulie messes up badly and goes for a fancy kick. Reacher uses the opportunity to knock him off his balance, and then (per the quote above) he doesn’t waste his time. He stomps on Paulie’s face and then each of his hands until the bones are poking through the skin, then breaks each of his arms.

He stood there like a stunned ox. There was blood in my mouth. Loose teeth. I felt no satisfaction. None at all. I hadn’t beaten him. He had beaten himself. With that kung-fu nonsense. If he had come at me swinging, I would have been dead inside a minute, and we both knew it.

In the book, Reacher and Paulie don’t continue their fight underwater, with Reacher supposedly killing Paulie before the latter comes back up like Rasputin. The tidal pool features in the book, but only because Reacher makes Paulie walk over there at gunpoint to save him the effort of carrying Paulie’s dead body:

I shot him twelve times in the chest. All twelve bullets passed straight through him. Big chunks of flesh and muscle followed them out over the ocean. One guy, two guns, twelve loud explosions, eleven dollars and forty cents in ammunition. He went down backward into the water. Made a hell of a splash.

I recommend reading the real fight scene from the book: it’s excellent. You can find the scene here, but it’s worth borrowing or buying Persuader, as it’s one of the better Reacher novels.

What would a good version of Reacher vs. Paulie have looked like, in my opinion?

• Shorter: The scene in the book is about ten e-book pages. It’s about three thousand words (so, not much more than this article) but still manages to bring us on a journey from expecting Reacher to kick Paulie’s ass (because he always kicks people’s asses), to worrying if he might actually be brown bread, to being relieved that he got away with it due to Paulie’s stupidity. The TV show could have done the same in one three-minute scene, with one cut at most to see what’s happening with the team in the house.
• Smarter: The scene in the book shows Reacher coming to terms with his own limitations for once. They could show this on screen too, although not in the same way that you get with a first-person narrative. Reacher should taunt Paulie more, like he does in the book (although it might have to be a bit sanitised for TV). These taunts would set up Paulie’s big mistake later on, because he’s riled up and wants to kill Reacher in a fancy way.
• Sicker: The fight scene in the book is gruesome. Again, it might have to be sanitised a bit for TV, but ideally they would show us just how awful a street fight to the death would be, rather than the cartoon violence we get in the show.

What do you think? I’m sad to say, however, that there’s a contingent out there who prefer the live-action version to the book fight scene in the book. To those people, I respectfully but firmly disagree.

Conclusion: The fight scene epitomises the mistakes of the show

If you think I was being unfair this week by focusing on just one scene, then I’ll ask you to reserve judgement until next week, when I’ll pick apart the smaller howlers I saw. I felt like the Looney Tunes logic of the Reacher vs. Paulie showdown deserved its own article, however. Besides, this scene sums up all of the shortcomings of the show.

Something which I want to go into more detail next week is how the show’s writers (and Reacher is far from the only culprit) have attempted to recreate the greatness of the novel by pulling in various elements from it. In doing so, however, they never succeeded in weaving those elements back together in a coherent way. They get small things right, but miss the bigger picture and the overall point. It’s like a “Cargo Cult” version of storytelling, but let’s pick this up next week and I’ll explain what I mean.

In the meantime, please do like and share this article if you’ve enjoyed it. It’s always great to see new people enjoying Military Realism and I appreciate all your support. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I might suggest using the link below to do so, and you’ll never miss a post. Please also weigh in on the comments section below whether you wholeheartedly agreed or vehemently disagreed with my analysis. Thanks, as always, and I’ll see you next week.

Featured Image: Reacher 3×08 – Reacher Kills Paulie, from YouTube via Kusum Vlog

1. Literally, but he’s only the second-biggest baddie in a figurative sense. ↩︎
2. I’m sorry, this is a terrible pun. My point is that there is no “planting” to lead up to the “payoff” of the blocked barrel. The first clue we get is when Paulie dies and Reacher explains what he’s done. This is extremely lazy storytelling. ↩︎
3. Not a “bullet”, as he says in the clip. A round is a complete system including bullet, cartridge case, propellant, and primer. A round goes into a gun, a bullet comes out. This might seem like a small detail but, as Reacher himself says, “In an investigation, details matter.” ↩︎
4. This is because armies like to buy belts with a set ratio of rounds, e.g. three ball rounds, one tracer round, and one armour-piercing round in a repeating pattern. ↩︎
5. I say this realising that I am in a metaphorical glass house here, throwing stones. ↩︎